JQL Query to filter out issues where Summary contains a particular word

[Keith Sellon-Wright]

I need to create a search filter that excludes all issues that contain the word "CLONE" in the Summary field.  (I have 5 issues used to clone to make new issues and don't want my users to accidentally update those when looking in search results.  They have Summary text with variations of "00-CLONE ME" etc.)

Right now my query is this - just need to add that last filter.  Have tried a number of variations, but with no luck. Any help is appreciated!

project = PM AND status in (Open, "In Progress", "Initiate Campaign", "Gathering Rqmts", "Testing Camp Setup", "Pending Doc", "Assgd to PM", "Assgd to Tech", "Modify DO Template", "In Prog - DO Templ Mods", "Clt Approved Script", "In Progress - PM", "Approval Requested", "Pending Client Apprvl", "Request Client Revisions", "Pending Client Revisions", "In Progress (Tech)", "Pending Data Contact Revs", "C-List Load Issues", "Extract Test Data", "Pending Data Contact Apprvl", "Test DO Approved", "Pre-Flight Complete", "Validate Pre-Flight", "Ops In Progress", "Ops Compl - Awaiting Closure", Assigned) ORDER BY created DESC

[Meck · Accepted solution]

Keith, Do you want to create a serch filter that excludes all issues that contain the word CLONE in the Summary filed?

So you can put 

*summary !~ "CLONE"*

at the search issue.

Regards.

Lameck.

[Keith Sellon-Wright]

That got me there, though it isn't exact so figured I should post this update.  Here's what I added to my existing query that worked:

AND summary !~ CLONE 

The * characters threw an error.  (working in Cloud version, so maybe that's why? Not sure)

Bottom line - it's working for me and will save me many headaches in the days to come.  Thank you.

[Meck]

Keith, good! 

The * is a typo. :/ 

But it's very good read that filter will save your time.  

Regards.

[Gomez, Daniel]

this worked for me, thanks!!!!!

[Eren]

It still doesn't work for me. 

I'm trying to return back-end stories that are labelled as [BE] in the issue summary. Can someone tell me what is wrong with this JQL? 

project = "X" summary ~ "\"[BE]\"" ORDER BY summary ASC, priority DESC, updated DESC 

It's not returning any issues even though a lot of issues has "[BE]" in the summary. 

[Andy Heinzer]

Hi @Eren

Jira cannot properly do partial word searching.  In turn it does not actually do well at searching mixed character strings.   Instead it is built to search for complete words.  Since this tag is rather short and contains other characters of "[" and "]" that is going to make it more difficult to find those issues when trying to extract this text out of summary field.   This partial word searching limitation is also noted in our documentation on Search syntax for text fields: Limtations: Whole words only.

However there could be other ways to find this information.  For example, the scriptrunner plugin for Jira will allow you to use regex searches in JQL searching.  Check out https://scriptrunner.adaptavist.com/latest/jira/jql-functions.html#_issuefieldmatch

This function provided via this plugin would then allow you to create a JQL syntax of something like this:

issueFunction in issueFieldMatch("project = X", "summary", "\[BE\]")

In turn this should then allow you to find the issues that might have that specific string in them.

It is also possible there are other plugins for Jira that can help here, I only cited the scriptrunner one because I know it has this regex search ability within JQL.

I hope this helps.

Andy

[Mash Huang]

Hi @Andy Heinzer

You save my life.  Thank you very much.

[Victor Catano]

Hi @Andy Heinzer, the explanation makes sense to me but it doesn't explain why  the following sentence word properly:

project = "X" summary ~ "FE" 

But this sentence doesn't bring results:

project = "X" summary ~ "BE" 

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Andy Heinzer]

Hi @Victor Catano 

That's very strange to see.  So I tried to replicate this behavior.  I found that I too could not find issues with the advanced JQL search of just

summary ~ "be"

Despite knowing that I have created issues with that very short word in the summary.  So in the process of investigating this, I switched the search from advanced back down to basic.  Then selected Summary and the word 'be'. I found this worked as expected, and returned the results:

So then I switched modes back to advanced.  I found that my string had additional escaping characters and an additional set of quotes.  

summary ~ "\"be\""

to be exact.

I'm still not sure why this is yet, but it does work.  I thought perhaps there exist certain words that are reserved in JQL, indeed there are, you can see a list of these in you can see in Advanced Searching: Restricted and reserved words.  But for whatever reason "Be" is not listed in that list.  I'm not sure is this is an oversight in the documentation, or a yet undocumented bug.  But I'm going to look into this further to try to figure that out.  Thanks for bringing it up.

Andy

[buksy]

Hi guys, it doesnt work because "be" is reserved word for JQL, it can be used as verb.

To use it you have to escape it similarly as @Eren did (\"[BE]\") so in your case just \"BE\" should work

[Elliot Gates]

You forgot the and

project = "X" AND summary ~ "\"[BE]\"" ORDER BY summary ASC, priority DESC, updated DESC 

[Connor Bell]

If anybody is encountering this now - The above posts claiming that "BE" is a reserved word is incorrect, and the above fixes will not work if your JIRA is set to English indexing.

This issue is caused by stemming. Jira will remove common English words when indexing issues. This can be resolved by:

System > General Configuration > Edit Settings > Indexing Language > Other > Update

You will now be able to search for "BE" correctly, without escapes. However, you will still need to use

"\"[BE]\""

for the brackets.

Credit to SimonThePug on Reddit.

Note that you may need to force a reindex on your project before this works fully.